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A wastewater treatment plant’s job description is pretty straightforward: Remove contaminants from sewage so it can be returned to the environment without harming people or wildlife. But a new study suggests that the treatment process can have an unintended consequence of promoting the spread of extra-hardy bacteria. Some bugs are resistant to antibiotics, so they dodge the medical bullets that wipe out others. The more drugs that are used, the more robust they become....

By Meeyoung ChoSEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea should reduce its reliance on nuclear power in view of public discontent with corruption in the industry and Japan’s difficulty tackling the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, a group weighing up the problem said on Sunday.The Energy Ministry published the findings of a study group of 60 representatives from industry, academic institutions and civic bodies that recommended reducing to between 22 percent and 29 percent the portion of electricity that can be generated by nuclear power....

The human body is a complex mosaic made up of clusters of cells with different genomes—and many of these clusters bear mutations that could contribute to cancer, according to a sweeping survey of 29 different types of tissue. It is the largest such study to date, and compiles data from thousands of samples collected from about 500 people. The results, published in June in Science, could help scientists to better understand how cancer starts, and how to detect it earlier....

View slide show Just a few weeks ago, the polar bear was identified as a “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. As the ice in the bear’s Arctic habitat melts due to global warming, many of these furry beasts will drown or starve to death. Other ice dwellers, like the walrus, will also struggle to survive as the planet heats up. And it’s not just the big animals that will suffer—even tiny mammals like the American pika and marine life like the Atlantic lobster face a bleak future....

The United States is in the midst of a long-running opioid epidemic that has killed nearly one million people since 1999 and cost over $1trillion in health care, law enforcement and social services since 2001. Safe injection sites, also known as supervised injection sites and opioid prevention centers, are places where people who use injectable, but illegal, opioids such as heroin, can do so without fear of overdose, prosecution or spreading disease....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Enterovirus D68 has gained a lot of media attention lately, being the first infectious disease coverage since the Ebola outbreak that’s made headlines. We all know how the media loves to over-dramatize infectious diseases–in fact, incidentally I just saw the movie World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, last week, and have to admit it even left me with a twinge of fear (and I’m not easily spooked!...

A small, small world: Each year Nikon solicits entries from thousands of scientists who use cameras and light microscopes to capture images of phenomena invisible to the naked eye. This year’s winner, announced October 13, is Jonas G. King, a Ph.D. candidate in biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. King and his lab’s principal investigator, Julián F. Hillyer, study the circulatory system of mosquitoes as it relates to malaria. [Also see “Halting the World’s Most Lethal Parasite,” on page 68....

Men circled the three women, their fists wrapped around thick iron pipes and wooden sticks. The women huddled on the ground at the center of their village in the western Indian state of Gujarat and whimpered as the crowd gathered. Two young men had died in the village, and the women were being called dakan, the Gujarati word for witch. They were accused of feasting on the young men’s souls. Madhuben clutched her right upper arm....

It might not occur to us surface dwellers very often, but rocks can flow—more like the way exceedingly lethargic toothpaste would rather than water. Exposed to the extreme temperatures and pressures that reign in the hellish realms far below our feet, rocks can practically swim—slowly diving down and bobbing up through much of Earth’s subsurface. For some rocky worlds around other stars, what is true for Earth’s innards may extend right up to the surface....

In its infancy, beginning about 4.5 billion years ago, the earth glowed like a faint star. Incandescent yellow-orange oceans of magma roiled the surface following repeated collisions with immense boulders, some the size of small planets, orbiting the newly formed sun. Averaging 75 times the speed of sound, each impactor scorched the surface–shattering, melting and even vaporizing on contact. Early on, dense iron sank out of the magma oceans to form the metallic core, liberating enough gravitational energy to melt the entire planet....

One of the most important continuous records of climate change—nearly four decades of satellite measurements of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice—might soon be interrupted. Scientists all over the world rely on the sea-ice record compiled by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. But the US military satellites that collect the data, by measuring ice extent using microwave sensors, are approaching the end of their lives....

Dear EarthTalk: Are elephant populations stable these days? – Reuben Perrin, Hartford, CT Far from it. The double whammy of poaching (illegal hunting) and habitat loss has led to a dramatic decline in populations of both African and Asian elephants in recent decades. In 1930, there were between five and 10 million wild African elephants, plying the entire African continent in large bands. Just 60 years later, when they were added to the international list of critically endangered species, only about 600,000 were scattered across a few African countries....

How do marine mammals avoid freezing to death? Do they ever feel cold? —“Disputatore” via Twitter D. Ann Pabst, a marine zoologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, bundles up a reply (as told to Coco Ballantyne): Marine mammals maintain a warm core temperature in frigid water with two broad types of responses: behavioral and physiological. A typical behavioral response is migration—in the winter, for instance, pregnant right whales migrate from waters off Canada and New England to the warmer coastal waters of Georgia and Florida to birth their young....

Playground veterans appreciate the marvel that is the Superball, the hard plastic sphere that rebounds almost completely when dropped and then just seems to keep on bouncing. Scientists have recently synthesized nature’s version of the Superball. Called resilin, the ultraenergy-efficient elastic protein enables fleas to make their leaps, flies to flap their wings and cicadas to sing their songs. An artificial version might find use in biomedical or industrial applications–perhaps as new stents, heart valves, spinal-disk implants, nanohinges, even running-shoe soles....

Carbon prices are spreading throughout the world’s largest economies. The only problem for climate hawks: They’re nowhere near high enough to produce a meaningful reduction in carbon emissions. That is the conclusion of a report issued yesterday by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The findings echo the analysis of previous studies and underscore the challenges facing countries, states and cities coming out of the recent climate summit in San Francisco....

Preliminary clinical trials show marijuana might be useful for pain, nausea and weight loss in cancer and HIV/AIDS and for muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis. Medical marijuana studies in the U.S. are dwindling fast, however, as funding for research in California—the only state to support research on the whole cannabis plant—comes to an end this year and federal regulations on obtaining marijuana for study remain tight. In July the Drug Enforcement Administration denied a petition, first filed in 2002 and supported by the American Medical Association, to change marijuana’s current classification....

U.S. EPA is continuing to quietly alter climate change information from the sub-pages of its website following the agency’s widely criticized decision more than a week ago to remove its main climate page. EPA has said it is updating the site to better reflect the Trump administration’s priorities, starting with deleting information on President Obama’s Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant emissions. Immediately following this announcement, though, visitors could still see climate change under the “Effects of Air Pollution” in the “Air” section of EPA’s list of “Environmental Topics....

If the sky turns green during a thunderstorm, gather up your pets and other loved ones and head for the cellar, a twister is on the way. So goes the common wisdom in much of the central U.S.—and other tornado-prone regions in the world, like Australia—when faced with a threatening sky (although some swear green means hail). Scientifically speaking, however, little evidence supports either the tornado or hail claims, though there is some evidence for green thunderstorms....

The current crisis in Syria parallels events that preceded the fall of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago, according to research published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The Akkadian empire flourished in the third millennium BC. Sometime around 2,200 BC drought hit, the lands dried and people migrated from urban centers. The government then collapsed, and the mighty empire began to falter in a series of calamities collectively referred to as the third-millennium Mesopotamian urban crisis....

Untreated drug and alcohol use contributes to tens of thousands of deaths every year and affects the lives of many more people. We have effective treatments, including medications for opioid and alcohol use disorders, that could prevent a significant number of these deaths, but they are not being utilized widely enough, and people who could benefit often do not even seek them out. One important reason is the stigma around those with addiction....